| ▲ | idle_zealot 9 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Was the hard part ever really the software, though? It's the Service part of SaaS that seems to provide the moat. Lock-in, habits, workflows, integrations, and trust. And don't discount the appeal of making some part of your operations "someone else's problem." Could you hire engineers or use an LLM to make your own Google Docs? Probably, yeah, but would that be worth the headache of being responsible for a bespoke internal document system? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | jonathaneunice 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
You might think you can, for a while. Been there, done that. But you probably can not do so sustainably in most cases. Even if you could, would you really be better off building vs. buying? Outsourcing development, operations, and maintenance is almost always the better choice, letting you focus on the things you do uniquely, differentiably, or meaningfully better. "We have this awesome internal version of Docs that we're responsible for fixing, upgrading, and doing support for" is not the flex "AI can code anything!" aficionados think it is. Especially when you also have similar internal versions of Sheets, Jira, Slack, GitHub, Linux, Postgres, and 100 other tools. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | bryanlarsen 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The article is about SAP, Salesforce, etc. Making your own Google Docs is stupid unless your company's core business is document management. OTOH Replacing SAP with a bespoke system will make a lot of sense for many companies. SAP is already the worst of both worlds. It'll have been highly customized for your flow so you've got all of the headaches of bespoke software and all of the headaches of SaaS. And unlike Google Docs, it'll be highly integral to your core business. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | airstrike 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
the problem is an AI can figure out habits and workflows pretty seamlessly. lock-in is artificial and loses power when it's really easy to make a competing app for large swaths of web apps. integration is likely the most valuable part of the puzzle, but it's also prone to disruption I think all that's left are like <50 apps each with their own very bespoke and "power user"-ready interface | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | llmslave 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
yes, if it takes one month to build something that took 9 months previously, it completely changes your go to market strategy | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | senko 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Could you hire engineers or use an LLM to make your own Google Docs Or you can just ask your LLM to install https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online Between open source, LLMs, and SaaS vendors getting greedy and privacy invasive, the total pain minimization calc might shift for some orgs. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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